“Will speech soon do away with typing” – This question has recently been raised by a large German Newspaper. Lately, more and more speech assistants like Google Assistant, Amazone’s Alexa, Microsoft Cortana or Apple’s Siri are reaching the market and all owing users to control many parts of their life by voice input. This Technology is called natural language and understanding (NLU) and may also be used to control web mapping technology. Imagine that you could say “show me all schools in Berlin” instead of using a selection tool to select those features.

Matthias Stein is a software engineer at con terra GmbH. Previously he studies Geoinformatics at the Bochum University of Applied Science.

Martin Wilden studies Geoinformatics at the University of Münster and worked as student assistant for 52° North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH. After studying he joined con terra GmbH as software developer.